Dear Xavi,

  I like very much your proposal. And I hope to see some of this suggestions in the near future in future releases. I love simplicity, and I find very attractive the flat-dark-monocrome theme. Thanks a lot for your work.

  I completely agree with your aims about doing this work. I also think that one of the main stoppers for many profesional designers to use Inkscape is UI (not features). It doesn't seem so a professional tool, even it has all the necessary to do a real professional work.

  In my opinion, there are 3 weaknesses in Inkscape to be the ultimate tool for all designers in the world:

  - Stability. I think the team is working hard in this issue, and the reality is that Inkscape is more and more stable and bug free everyday. So I'm sure this point will be the less important in short time.

  - UI: I agree 100% with Xavi tema ideas. The actual Inkscape UI is not attractive, modern nor professional, and not so easy for beginners.

  - Lack of integration in a suite. Professionals use several tools, to able to use all of this in the same way and with consistent usability will be the killer value to achieve the level of reconnaissance that Inkscape merit. In open source world there are many good tools to do a suit, but there is no coordination between them to provide a coordinated offer or solution. I know that this issue is very complicated to manage, and there are several options for do the same things. But from my part as a professional user of this tools, I think that will be very powerful to have a suite (coherent and consistent UI and look and feel, and some minimal integration features between them). In my opinion some good candidates to do this suite will be: Inkscape, Gimp, Krita, Darktable and Pitivi (and I have a doubt with Scribus); but I know that there are other candidates. I think all of them are very good tools (and professional suitable), and every of them complement the others. I think also, that this kind of collaboration will provide new users for one tool to the others.

  Cheers,
     Fernando

2014-12-18 18:23 GMT+01:00 Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...400...>:
Hi Martin and Gez,

First of all, thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it!
I will try to answer to your feedback on the same email since you agree in some ideas.

 1. The first thing I think is that you've confused the tools which
effect the canvas, with the "panels zone" activation. You'll notice how
none of the current tools activate the panels. But this is ok because
many of your ideas could be proper tools, while others should be
re-thought when it comes to the panels and how they are activated and
hidden.

I think those buttons should be placed as a header of the panels area. They belong there, it makes more sense to look for them in that area and in the proposed position they break the toolbar in two categories that are not necessarily regarded as "primary and secondary" by users. The reordering of the existing tools is in my opinion questionable. I'm all for grouping similar tools under the same button (the primitives creation tools together, for instance), but the new ordering shouldn't disrupt the usual workflow unless there's a compelling reason to re-locate the tools.

We thought about this and we think you are right. Our idea was to keep in a single area all the tools that a user could need at first sight. Also, based on different user profiles and expertise levels, we divided the tools into primary and secondary tools, but we are not sure it will fit in every user need so we reverted this idea and took out the panels icons. We like the 0.91 version where all panels are actually panels instead of floating windows. Based on the gestalt idea of proximity we thought it could be useful to add panel icons to the right side as a panel bar as Gez proposed.

 a. The path selection tool is high use for a lot of use cases. It's low
use only applies to some cases, so we should be careful not to bury it.

Agree 100%
This is one example of a tool that is currently placed in a handy position (by the select tool) and in the proposal falls to a less convenient place.
 
Since we re-arranged the tools in the left sidebar, path selection tool got promoted to the 4th position. 

 b. The Align tool would be useful if it was a selection mode with the
align tools all nicely designed into the settings bar. Certainly solve
my align handles design issue if it was a tool. It might be possible to
add the distribute and grid align tools too.

We are trying not to add new features if not needed by just rearranging the current icons to keep it simple. Said that, we think that sounds like a great idea. We are not sure about the align tool (it could become a new click to open the tool options every time we want to align something). But the grid really looks like a tool and we think it should be a tool instead of a bar in the right side.

 c. The document settings could just be renamed 'document' and the most
common elements of document settings could be on the tool bar too. This
would certainly help with future multi-page support.

Changed on the image
 
 d. XML editing is fairly low use for most cases, it's buried I think
because of that.

With our new layout arrangement it gets moved to the right bar, next to the panels. Its only used by some developer profiles but we think it will become more useful when SVG becomes more a trend on web design as well. (it's coming!)

 e. Tweak paths has gone away. It's very useful for some cases.

We think its part of the Paths tools so we grouped all this tools together. We tried to make it clear on the document. Do you think it should be an independent tool?

 f. Not sure what edit object would do. Open the objects panel?

Sorry, it’s a typo, the correct name is “edit fill & stroke properties”. It is fixed now. :)

That was really helpful. We added a new version of our tools bar proposal with your suggestions.


Thanks again for your feedback. This was our first iteration. We will be happy to receive more feedback to make it even better.

Best,
Xavi

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